Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of InnovationReally intrigued by the title. Fabulously diverse in examples. If you ever felt like a square in round world, this book will make you sing for joy because that's what life is about--growing, moving, evolving.... The book is much stronger for being in Science section and not restricted to business innovation alone.

Bottom line: I wanted to fall in love with this book, but I could only muster a strong "let's be friends" attraction. If you grok this blog you'd think I'd be gagga over a book that purportedly marries "the right brain and left. Yin and yang. Analytical and intuitive" (words lifted off my own blog description) - but it fell short in a few places and turned me off in other spots.

I'm still in the throes of Conceptual Age musing. So if the 3 R's of education (reading, writing, arithmetic) don't constitute the end all and be all of vocational success in the future, what are the foundational prime skills for the future? And I mean foundational building blocks of the "high concept, high touch" aptitudes geared around design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning that Pink explores .

I just love how I flipped to this opening passage Sunday and found my answer. Incredibly perfect timing.

Humanity has come now to a crossroads. We have lived the one-dimensional man, we have exhausted it. We need now a more enriched human being, three-dimensional. I call them the three C's, just like the three R's - the first C is consciousness, the second C is compassion, the third C is creativity.

Consciousness is being, compassion is feeling, creativity is action. My vision of the new human being has to be all the three simultaneously. I am giving you the greatest challenge ever given, the hardest task to be fulfilled. You have to be as meditative as a Buddha, as loving as a Krishna, as creative as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci. You have to be all together, simultaneously. Only then your totality will be fulfilled; otherwise something will remain missing in you. And that which is missing in you will keep you lopsided, unfulfilled. You can attain a very high peak if you are one-dimensional, but you will be only a peak. I would like you to become the whole range of the Himalayas, not just a peak but peaks upon peaks. - Osho, from Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within

And the alliteration nicely helps us remember: The Conceptual Age building blocks are the 3 C's: consciousness, compassion and creativity.

Bonus: I opened the pages in March/April issue of Breath Magazine and a two-page spread article (what! it's 2005 and the story is not online) accentuates a huge photo of a yoga class in beautiful Zen-inspired architectural environment. Nope, not a spa. Double-take: It's the innovative Ross School (here for school mission). "...the Ross School hopes to send graduates into the world with one thing above all else: an open mind."

And this quote lifted from the Ross School website "The future is a race between education and catastrophe." - H.G. Wells

Bonus: The Economist in their March 10, 2005 issue defends the SAT exams. A balanced reminder on the origins of the exam: the rich and idle WASP man was overrunning the Ivy league; the SAT exam intent was to level the playing field and reform admissions a bit more towards merit rather than social networks. It also touches on the complex problem of ranking "merit" and selecting students from among the millions of college applicants.